Spain: Supreme Court defend corrupts, attacks freedom of speech

No wonder Spain is, along with Italy and other countries a headache for EU: while the head of the Supreme Court lamented some time ago that citizens seldom denounce corruption, they now sentence to a huge fine of 15,000 euros to journalists reporting on corruption in the Canary island of Lanzarote.

It seems obvious that corruption is upheld from the highest instance of the state, which do not stop just at persecuting innocent Basque citizens, hiding systematic tortures, interpreting that the state-backed death squads are not "terrorist" or even bringing to court their colleague Baltasar Garzón for daring to dig too much in the dirty fascist past of the Spanish rotten political system.

They also let go clear cases of corruption such as that of judge José Antonio Martín, former president of the provicial court of Las Palmas (Canary Islands), when he put his legal knowledge at the service of a well known narcotraffic capo and pressed his colleagues for him to be set free. And now they even go further, persecuting media (Cuadernos del Sureste) for reporting that Felipe Fernández Camero, then Secretary of the Town Hall of Arrecife (Canary Islands) doubled as legal representative for for real state companies, which is illegal as well as highly suspicious, suspicions that they emphasized by his thesis as Town Secretary which were usually coincident with the interests of the real state corporations.

Naturally (for Spanish standards of democracy and transparency), the provincial tribunal sentenced, without even proper trial, the magazine and its speaker to pay 6000 and 9000 respectively to the corrupt politician. However this sentence was revoked by the Provincial Court, that decided that the use of the term "corruption" was appropriate (there seems that there are some honest judges who like transparency and free speech too). The issue of course had political repercusions and Fernández Camero was fired by an order issued directly from Madrid and is now being persecuted in two different trials for corruption, along with two former majors.

But the issue did not end there for the Canarian magazine and the prevaricator appealed nothing less than to the Supreme Court. Now it's been known that they initial sentence that fined them has been upheld at the highest tribunal of the Kingdom of Spain.

Antonio Marsá, speaker of the magazine and the main victim of this judiciary abuse, recalled in his declarations to the press, that the behaviour of the Spanish tribunals is worrying. He explicitly metioned the sentence by the Madrid Provincial Court against media corporation SER and specifically its journalists Daniel Anido and Rodolfo Irago for reporting on irregular affiliations of conservative politicians.

In brief: it's clear that Spain is the private ranch of a petty oligarchy and that judges are there to defend their priviliges.

Source: Rebelión.